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Friday, March 30, 2012

I thought that I'd share some progress on the brickwork. Obviously still a work in progress, but you get the point...

A simple jig was made out of some scrap shelving bits and a piece of hardboard that was laying around. I cut all the foam into the approximate width that I wanted and then built the forms around the pre-cut piece. Once this was secured down, I determined the approximate width that I wanted and put a piece of the shelving stock down to act as a depth guide.

After the jig was built, its a simple matter of sliding the foam towards the depth guide and using a VERY SHARP knife, slicing the little buggers one at a time until I have a pile of them to start gluing. The rest is history. When gluing the bricks, it is best to work from the center out, creating a guide line to work on both sides of. This will keep your bricks looking straighter than if you start from the top down or vice-versa.

Coments, Questions?

Post them here, or use the "Contact Us" link at the top and send me an email to let me know how I'm doing.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

After the overwhelming surge of shelf sales this past month, I have been working on overload in the shop. If you still have not received your shelving yet, another batch will be due to ship at the end of the week for next Monday. Look for those in the mail sometime not next week, but next.

I try and get all of these shelves out as timely as possible, however the volume of orders that has run in and right off the shelves has not only wiped my stock shelves, but also has resulted in several hours of cutting and gluing. This last batch will be outta here soon!

Thank you to everyone for your purchases, each one of YOUR orders are important to me and quality is key to this product. A lot of time and energy goes into creating these shelves.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Well, in a true TTG fashion, we decided to go BIG! I'm not talking about anything other than an eight foot heavy armored train with an extensive scenario map to play it on! That's right, folks, TTG Bunker is building and play testing a HUGE scenario battle that might just be featured in an un-mentioned trade show! The details will be kept secret, but this scenario game will end your thinking about current 40K scenarios. The level of detail planned for this event is being thought out by myself and a few of the elite among our 40K gaming group, and each map section will be sure to create plenty of challenges for each team as they battle it out in the name of the Emperor!

In a proper TTG fashion, I'll be posting progress shots of various map sections. Just like in the past, you will see some VERY WIP photos where you just might be scratching your head and wondering; What in the hell is that?!? Well, this post should get your gears rolling! Please post some comments/questions and I'll be glad to answer as best I can.

Enjoy!

I manually cut and glued about 850 bricks so far just for the arches. This process is not as slow as you might imagine, but cutting them takes a good bit of time. The simple green jug you see is holding my vacuum formed arch in place while the spray foam sets.

Here is a sneak peek of one of the heavy armored train cars. This picture also shows you the intent of this giant foam conglomeration. It will be a very large viaduct spanning a ravine. The train, for scale purposes is approx one foot long.

This is a shot of me wiping off the flex paste which I used to grout the bricks for a realistic mortar look. I first painted the foam bricks with latex house paint, and then dry brushed several layers of reds and browns over top the latex paint. After the paint was dry, I sanded lightly to weather them with a foam sanding pad and some green sponges. Then I smashed the flex paint all over the bricks and wiped the surface off with a damp cloth. The process took about ten minutes in all, once I had all my materials in place.

This is what the end result looks like after a quick APJ wash using his parchment recipe. After this dried, it turned just a bit lighter, but the picture above is pretty close to the model as it sits now.

I hope this blog will show you what you can do with some scrap packaging foam and a lot of patience! Now get out there and build something!